#sff2014

Day 56

Satisfying

What an excellent day!  I awoke to the sound of rolling thunder, which I have mentioned previously is actually a positive thing - meaning the temperature and humidity drop down to bearable levels.  It felt wonderful all day.  For lunch, the other two interns at my office joined me on food street in Chinatown (complete with selfie-taking).  I got to try two very traditional dishes from the Hokkien culture, only available this week during the Food Festival: rickshaw noodles and rice cake bowl (wa kueh), both of which were delightful.  

Work seemed to go by especially fast today, so that was also a good sign!  At the end of the day, I met up with the other fellows at the National Museum of Singapore to check out the free exhibits on display.  One was about the history of food culture in Singapore, and the other, a historical photography exhibit.  The food culture one was actually really fascinating! I saw old tools and methods used to make the traditional dishes that I have been able to try over the past two months.  It is so fascinating to me to see how not only the recipes are handed down through generations, but also the art of mastering each dish.  This is why I get so excited about food from Singapore.  It is really the strongest aspect of culture that you will find here, and people are incredibly passionate about it.  

Day 49 

Struggle-bus

Today was uneventful if you exclude the fact that I still cannot figure out the bus system here and got lost on my way to a new yoga studio. I missed the class and ended up 3 MRT stops away from where I started. Oh well.

Iranian filmmaker Shahram Mokri's feature length Fish & Cat is constructed in a single take. Opening with a text preamble (based on a real-life case) about a restaurant that secretly served meat made from humans, the film establishes a dark tension early on. We grip the arms of our cinema seats in anticipation of the violence that will surely follow. Surely, right? Of course we don't want to see blood and gore, but when it is promised and never delivered the audience is left on a precipice. I even felt something like vertigo walking out of the cinema. Mokri meandering scenelets evade a climax entirely. This diversion, or more accurately repression, of audience expectations makes the film a commendably surreal if not at times banal experience. 

Courtin-Wilson's first feature film Hail (2011), blurred the lines between fact and fiction allowing unrefined realities to co-exist alongside stylised surrealism. In Ruin I found nothing quite so moving or challenging. The plot isn't all that interesting which makes the explicit and highly gendered violence feel ill-considered.